


A Dark Doom and a Wandering Wild

by kenaz



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Doriath, First Age, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 00:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5950042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beleg is sent to find Luthien and bring her to captivity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dark Doom and a Wandering Wild

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cinaed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinaed/gifts).



So silent were the woods in the days following Thingol’s decree that even Beleg could not mask his footfalls. The crackle of leaf mould echoed after each pursuing step in a quietude that ran far deeper than the sullen muting of Daeron’s harp. The unmoving air was laden with solemnity that boded ill.

He had shadowed Luthien’s departure from Thingol’s halls, chasing the swift draught of her skirt-tails, but he had done so at a distance so she might have privacy for her sorrows. She could not evade him; after all, who had been the one to show her the forest’s hiding places? Many had emerged over the years, some outgrown and some abandoned, but Beleg never forgot: coverts in hedgerows where a wee slip of a thing might hide from bedtime until sleep overtook her, whence he might carry her to her mother’s waiting arms; shallow caves requiring a man to duck and crouch, but where a youngling might unfold to her full stature and dance with delight at the mouth of a secret spring; strong and willing trees for a girl to climb where she might look beyond the forest to the wide land rolling toward rocky pinnacles and piers beyond...

...or here, where he now stood, within a dark and tightly-clustered copse where boughs conspired to shelter a woman beneath a canopy of leaf and star.

Grief rendered her deaf to his approach, which troubled him. He had taught her how to listen to the woods, trained her ears-- rendered by Maiarin grace keener even than his own-- to hear the whispers of the trees and the padding of animal paws. Yet he had come well within the encircling limbs and stood at grasping distance before she turned. 

Finally catching sight of him, she startled. “You have been following me.” 

Beleg could not bear the accusatory brightness of her stare. 

“My kennel must be finished.” Bitterness rendered her voice tuneless. Captious moonlight danced across the defiant angle of her cheek, casting it in foliate filigree. “Did my father bid you throw a rope around my neck and drag me to it?” 

“He did not bid me.” Beleg answered in a low, even tone. “I volunteered. He wished to send Daeron.”

“I will not hear that name! Twice he has betrayed my trust!”

Beleg raised a placating hand. “He thought only of your safety.”

“He thought only of himself!”

He did not gainsay her. Daeron’s interest in Luthien was as conspicuous as it was unrequited; held up to the light of this resolute truth, his thwarted pride cast a long and crooked shadow. In the minstrel’s defense, Beleg could muster little more than a shrug. “He did as he felt he must.”

“I will never forgive him.”

“You will. It is not in your nature to bear grudges. Consider you may yet have need of him; he would do nearly anything to return to your good graces.”

“Did he imagine he might win my heart through treachery?” Her skirts flared as she gave Beleg her back. “He is a vain little man, and I was a fool to call him friend!” She carded her hands claw-like through hair. “My father’s men laughed loud and long when he sent Beren forth, and loudest of all laughed Daeron, whose hands have danced on harp-strings but who has never pulled a bow!” Slow breaths through tight lips quelled her anger. She looked over her shoulder to Beleg and assessed him in silence before saying, “I watched you, then. I wanted to know your mind in that moment, for you are a law unto your own, Cúthalion; If you had laughed or grinned, I would have know Beren lost, and my hope forlorn. But you did not laugh.”

Beleg’s jaw flexed and released. Luthien may have been measuring his response, but he had been watching Melian. Ever chary with words but eloquent in her silences, the pain of wisdom in her ancient eyes told Beleg more was at play here than a father’s wrath and a young man’s bluster. “Your hope may yet be forlorn, Luthien, and Beren may yet be lost. But what joy should I take from a task bringing naught but suffering?” In truth, he found the deed unworthy of Thingol, a guileful means of holding to the letter of his oath to do no harm while abandoning utterly the spirit of it. Yet allegiance stopped his lips from speaking this thought aloud. “Your father was within his right to challenge him, but it was not well done of the men to crow.”

Luthien spun toward him so swiftly he nearly flinched. Her eyes, stars caught in a timeless, youthful face, had turned as hard and sharp as flint. “Right?” She spat the word like a malediction, her inflection singeing the air like an unbanked ember. “By what right does the king sunder me from my fate? He would hold me prisoner at his whim and forbid me my heart’s desire. Is my own will never to be considered? He bids me sing for his delight yet turns a deaf ear when I use my voice to speak of my own wants!” She paced from bole to bole, a hunted thing, shoulders hunched by a rising frustration that could scarce be borne by the fine bones of her frame. “Hundreds of years I have trod these paths. Hundreds of years I have watched acorn grow to oak. I am no child!” Her limbs quaked, joined in sympathy by the branches around her, the very trees yielding and bending their withy boughs before her righteous anger. “Why does the word ‘daughter’ hold greater weight than the word ‘woman’? One keeps me in bondage while the other should free me to live as I wish! Or am I nothing more than a token to be bestowed or withheld as my father chooses?”

Her desperation pained him, yet he had no answer that would give comfort. After all, even Melian the Maia submitted to the will of the king.

Her shoulders sagged beneath his silence, and she shut her eyes. “For shame, Beleg,” she whispered thickly. “You taught me woodcraft and ancient magic and the skill of the hunt. But of all the knowledge you had to impart, you kept this secret: that all these lessons are powerless against the shackles of my sex. Take me to my father, then. My will means nought, and it is pointless to evade his further.”

In his mind’s eye, Beleg saw the vestige of the child who had once stood with both feet on one of his boots, arms locked around his thigh, heard the bright chorus of her laughter as he feigned, walking stiff-legged under her clutch, not to see her, calling her name in a sing-song voice while she giggled. Yet here before him stood that child now grown, defeat writ plain across her once-proud brow. Beleg had never before known such a keen sense of failure, the taste of ashes in his mouth.

He drew in a breath. “Fate does not, I think, will it that I should have a child of my own making. Yet always I have looked upon you with the eyes of a father, Luthien. With a father’s pride, and a father’s joy... and yet also with a father’s fear. When Thingol pronounced Beren’s quest, you saw only his pride... But I saw his fear.”

“What does he fear? That I have found love with one who is not of my own kind?” Her nostrils flared, but her eyes had begun to well. “Well, then! I am made from his own mold! He should be quite proud.”

Beleg shook his head, ignoring the asperity that was so unlike her. “His daughter, who by birthright should never know the sting of death, would bind herself to a Mortal, whose fate is to be but a frail and fading light upon this earth-- that is what he fears! That Beren is valiant and true I have no doubt, but Luthien, child of my heart, his life is but a spark beside the torch of your long years! Your paths were not designed to cross, but to diverge.” 

Luthien turned on him. “Cúthalion ought not speak of what he cannot yet ken!” 

Birds took wing from the branches, the trembling of leaves echoing in their flight. The voice was not her own, but a low warning spoken to Beleg’s soul. A slow shudder rippled from the nape of his neck down the length of his spine. Her eyes glowed with the fey light of her mother’s. They bored through him, appraised him, saw into and beyond him. 

“I see the touch of a mortal hand upon Cúthalion’s soul...the very road against which he cautions is worn bare by his footfalls!” 

The words sowed within Beleg a seed of disquiet. His feet took him backward of their own volition, as if his body sought to evade the chilling thrust of this portent. 

As swiftly as the storm had come upon her, it passed: the fierce and frightening canniness that had suffused her departed like mist, leaving the familiar Luthien once again before her, though the birds, ever her friends and her delight, were slow in returning to her presence. As she rushed toward him, he found himself resisting the urge to back away.

“I will find him. I must.” The strength of her fingers surprised him when they cinched white-knuckled around his biceps. Her gaze, clear and present once more, was as full of pain as with dreadful certainty-- as Melian’s eyes had been in Thingol’s halls. “Beleg, he suffers.” 

Her heart was a wild thing, and Beleg knew the way of wild things: restrained against their will, they struggled until that very heart gave out. To sentence her to captivity, no matter the righteousness of the motive, was to sentence her to grief beyond her soul’s bearing. He shuttered his eyes against the straining of his loyalties. Her relentless determination, her boldness, her utter single-mindedness brought to mind the one who sired her, the one to whom he had sworn fealty. “Unhappy Luthien. You have so much of your father about you, most of which is commendable! But if he were he to ask me--”

She shook her head emphatically as the tears at last overfilled her eyes and tumbled down her cheeks. “No. Your word is your bond, and I will not tarnish it. If go I must, I go alone, and none must lend me aid, not even you, whom I most trust.”

“Would that I could help you.” He drew her close, enfolded her in his arms, felt her shudder as she sobbed. “By my duty I am ensnared.” In aiding her he would I betray his oath to serve Thingol and protect the wood and its inhabitants; yet in forsaking her did he not do the same? Her head fit neatly beneath his chin and he rested it there, a moment of both frustration and reprieve. “Why must I be set in opposition to you?”

He felt the measured rise and fall of her shoulders, the slow shaking of her head against his breast. “We do not always choose our fates, Beleg.”

He thought of her perspicacious gaze, the preternatural intensity behind her voice. “No,” he conceded. “We do not.” Her warning returned to him, the peculiar fruit of his unease taking root within him. Was it of Beren she had spoken? Would he, too, play some role in this poor man’s fate? Or would some other hapless mortal find his way by chance into Thingol’s wood? He dared not look too deeply; these things were not yet his to grasp, and speculating on half-formed visions was a fool’s errand. In any case, his mind was now reconciled in this: while he could not help her, he would not hinder her.

“Do not despair.” He released her from his embrace and held her at a slight distance, looking her up and down as if to commit her to his memory. “The borders of your father’s land are perilous, especially where your mother’s power and Sauron’s sorcery clash; I will venture out alone and linger there as long as I might. There is no shortage of bloody work for me on the marches, and your father will praise my efforts and think little of my absence.”

For the first time since the stranger Beren had departed from Doriath, a smile, small and grateful, began to emerge on Luthien’s face. Her lips parted as though to speak, but he lay his finger over them and canted his head, a warning imparted in his implacable expression. “Say nothing; I dare not even imagine what will come of your plans. You have chosen the path of danger, and yet I of all men cannot condemn you, for I, too, court it, and of my own will. I ask only that you move with caution and with care.” She nodded, but he caught her chin in his hand and lifted it, holding her eyes hostage with his own. “The world beyond is dark, Luthien. Darker than you have yet imagined. Whatever horrors your heart forebodes, heed them! For you will find them all and worse before your journey ends.”

Her face was solemn now as she nodded.

“You truly love him, this ill-starred Man.”

“With all I am,” she answered simply. 

Beleg was thankful in that moment that he was not her father, for it allowed him the strength to step aside, to see her not as a daughter, but as a woman in the fullness of her strength and powers, with a will of iron and a soul of grace. He understood Thingol’s fear, but he would not claim it as his own. This wild-hearted creature was not his to hold or to deny, and so he released her to her choices and her fate, as she herself willed it.

“I have said you have much of your father within you, my twilight lady. Yet you have more of your mother still.” He lifted a lock of her hair and twined it around his fingers. “You possess a canniness I dread to think on.” He let the silk of it slip like black water through his fingers, and just before the final strands fell away from his fingers, he gave them a tug, not knowing quite why. “I believe you will discover resources within yourself even you cannot yet imagine.

“Come now, to that ‘kennel’ your father has made for you, and do not judge him too harshly for it: he is guided by love as much as by pride, and blinded by fear, as much as he has been granted wisdom. Rest, and think on your purpose. Make no move until you have imagined every outcome and measured every threat. And I…” He shook his head, swallowed. “I will be far, far away from here.”

“You will hear nothing of me, nor lay eyes upon me.”

“I believe this, and I also fear it.”

“Your honor will not be dunned for my sake.”

He sighed heavily. “This, too, I fear.”

They looked at each other long and hard, in wonder as much as in affection.

“We have not yet seen the last of each other, beloved Cúthalion.”

He smiled sadly. “I fear to believe your words lest they be proven false, and I am broken by my part in this.” A shadow of doubt descended over her face but he willed it away with the sweep of his hand. “But fear is a luxury we can ill afford. We do not always choose our fates, you say; and so I bid you go: take succor in Hirilorn’s branches until you deem it time to take up this mantle of your quest. I shall deliver you, then make myself scarce.”

He offered his arm, and after drying her eyes she took it, the delicate but deceptively strong hand finding its place in the crook of his elbow, and squeezing it tight. 

“Thank you,” she whispered. Beleg could think of nothing more to say.

Thus Beleg returned Luthien to her father’s keeping and left her, high in the arms of the great beech tree, to the cunning of her own devices. He reached the marches alone by nightfall. 

Somewhere beyond the woods, in the impenetrable darkness through which even he could scarcely see, a nightingale began to sing.


End file.
